Return to
NomadNetBy Hugh Nevill, AFP
MOGADISHU, Aug 8
The Somali faction headed by former US marine Hussein Aidid is showing signs that it may disintegrate soon, analysts said Thursday.
The election of the inexperienced 33-year-old last Sunday to replace his slain father, General Mohamed Farah Aidid, was seen here as an attempt to keep the south Mogadishu-based faction together.
Hussein Aidid has spent virtually all his adult life in the United States, where he went as a teenager, returning briefly in 1993 as a marine with a US intervention force battling his father's militias.
A reservist, he was sent back to America as his father's militias dragged the bodies of slain US troops through the streets of Mogadishu.
He came back again last year, married, and became head of the faction's security committee, helping his father to secure the strategic town of Baidoa, 240 kilometres (140 miles) northwest of Mogadishu and the main centre of the fertile Juba River valley.
With his muscular build -- unusual among Somalis, who are generally slim -- and his marine swagger, he became popular with the faction's unpaid and unkempt militiamen.
But the ability to keep a faction together in this Horn of Africa nation where clan politics make those of Byzantium appear simple depends on years of experience.
The powerful figures in each clan, sub-clan, sub-sub-clan and sub-sub-sub-clan are frequently not those put forward as leaders, and the alliances shift almost daily.
Aidid, who tried to appear "presidential" during an interview on Tuesday, wearing slacks, jacket and tie, and speaking so quietly as to be almost inaudible, was flanked then by General Jama Mohamed Ghalib, the hard-line "foreign minister" in the unrecognised "government of Somalia" his father set up last June.
Ghalib, a northern Issak, was close to General Aidid, a member of the Saad sub-clan of the Habr Gedir sub-clan of the central Somalia Hawiye, because the two men thought the same way, according to Somalis who knew them both.
It was clear during the interview that Ghalib was in charge -- he fielded the tricky questions.
Somali analysts say Aidid was given the top job because the alternatives, such as Abdul Rahman Ali "Tuur," another Issak, and the first president of breakaway Somaliland in the northwest, would have divided the alliance immediately.
With the general gone, the power of the Issaks in the alliance is seen as residual -- they do not have militias of their own -- and the power behind the throne is up for grabs, the analysts say.
Feelers from various clan groupings within the faction began to go out as soon as Hussein Aidid was nominated and accepted without dissent by the faction's leadership on Sunday, they said.
Those soundings are being made through third parties, and are thus deniable. A British newspaper reported that the "government's "interior minister," Mohamed Qanyare Afrah, had told diplomats in Nairobi that Aidid's accession was a "coup."